


Kiss This Guy

by Ladycat



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Kissing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 02:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1180959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It shouldn’t bother me,” he half-shouted, “and that’s why it’s bothering me so much! It’s—it’s petty. Really petty,” he finished, miserably.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kiss This Guy

It wasn’t a big deal. No, really, it _wasn’t_. In the grand cacophony that was their day-to-day life, it was inconsequential.

Except Rodney couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Distractions of this nature weren’t something Rodney was very used to. He didn’t get distracted, the broad expanse of his own mental steam engine unable to be diverted—or at least, not completely off the tracks, anyway, and he was _completely_ off the tracks right now.

Data scrolled gold and green in front of his eyes, numbers and letters flickering meaninglessly while his mind focused on the soft, sweeping curve, the hint of pink—

“Ah, perhaps you are finished now?”

Rodney jerked, and only a lucky catch stopping his mug from crashing onto the floor. That, in itself, was a bad sign; Rodney was death on anyone else bringing food into the labs, but he was just as hard on himself, too. And yet—coffee cup. Sitting at his elbow, the surface tension of the dark liquid broken as it sloshed back and forth. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

It was one of those rules that Rodney carried around in his head the way other people carried their precious Golden Rule. Except this time, it absolutely didn’t apply.

“Rodney!” Radek wasn’t precisely shouting yet, but it was getting close. He shoved his glasses up his nose when Rodney finally looked at him, frowning. “Are you ill? Usually illness are heralded with loud moaning and pleas for attention.”

Oh, _so_ funny. “Do they pay you for the stand up time? Because you’re obviously not charging enough, and so long as it doesn’t come out of the science budget, really, you should ask for a raise.”

“Ha, ha,” Radek dead panned. The frown hadn’t faded. “Rodney, this experiment has been done for almost twenty minutes, and still you hog the only computer five of us need.”

“What?” Belatedly, Rodney focused on the streaming numbers—and then cursed. “Damn him! I mean, damn _it_ , dammit and now I have to do this whole thing over again—”

“Not today, you will not,” Radek said firmly. Elizabeth had once quipped that managing scientists was one part herding cats, the rest of the parts devoted to mothering them. Radek had become particularly good at the latter, at least when it came to Rodney. “Experiment will wait, as will everything else you have planned. You are useless, Rodney. Go, see nurse who will feed your hypochondria, or have lunch, take afternoon walk on the wrap-around balconies. Be not here.”

“Are you kicking me out of my own lab?”

Radek crossed short, stubby arms over his short, stubby chest, somehow escaping how foolish he should've looked for a familiar, implacable stubbornness. “Yes.”

It was tempting to argue. Most of the time, he _did_ argue, inadvertently providing his lab with a great deal of amusement, usually. But Radek didn’t press if he didn’t think it was important for somebody’s sanity, and Rodney had gotten a lot better at recognizing that.

“Fine,” he said, quickly shutting his failed experiment down with a few sharp clicks of the keyboard. The numbers melted into pixilated blobs of color before fading from the screen, the usual way Ancient equipment shut itself down. No one knew why. “I cannot _believe_ this.”

“That I am pretending to be your long-beloved mother?”

“Please, nobody loved that harpy and I’m pretty sure Jeannie danced on her grave,” he snapped back, mentally wincing. Jeannie would kill him, if she knew what he’d said. “No, not that, I just—I can’t believe it’s affecting my _work!”_

Work was sacrosanct, the one place where the minutia of daily life fell away until only the pure, glittering perfection of science filled his mind. It wasn’t just his protected Ivory Tower, which wasn’t all that protected at the SGC anyway, it was his _home_.

And now even _that_ was affected, mind completely derailed, his work ruined and—Rodney tried very, hard not to imitate one of Ronon’s growls. It never came out right anyway.

Dammit. It was _stupid_ , and Rodney very rarely did anything that was stupid.

So why couldn’t he stop thinking about it?

* * *

“May I join you, Doctor McKay?”

Once again, it was only fast reflexes that saved Rodney’s drink from ending up splattered on the floor. This time, however, it was Teyla’s reflexes so not much luck involved. “Ah, of course,” he said, belatedly standing until she settled his mug, her tray, and then seated herself. “And please call me Rodney? I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for you to call me Rodney when we're in public.”

Teyla’s smile went enigmatic, but pleased. “I will endeavor to remember this time. Rodney.”

“Well. Good. Thank you.” He stabbed his fork back into the real powdered mashed potatoes on his tray and wished they tasted as good as he remembered. He used to love these.

It was a full five minutes before Rodney realized that neither of them were talking, silence heavy without being stifling. Teyla was watching him, chewing on a carrot that tasted like beets thoughtfully. “Perhaps you will go for a walk with me after lunch,” she said.

“Great,” he said, scowling, “does everyone know Radek banned me from the labs? Again?”

“I received no such communication, but I did believe it a likely possibility. There is a... face you make. Here.”

A slim, delicate finger—callused as heavily as his own, for all its slender grace, and startlingly warm—touched him in the middle of his forehead. “Um,” he said eloquently. Teyla didn’t often touch him when there were no guns, or they weren't running for their lives.

“It is not a good face,” she scolded him with a smile. “You look quite enraged, only it is not your angry-face, either.”

“I have faces? You’ve _cataloged_ those faces?”

Almost prim despite the teasing smile, she said, “Sometimes missions can be very long. Although I believe John’s angry-face is far more frightening than your own. You merely look determined, not... I believe the word is ‘demented’?”

“He _is_ demented.” And right then, he didn’t give a damn how childish that was.

“Ah,” Teyla said. She applied herself to her lunch, but Rodney knew her well enough to read the vaguely satisfied air around her. Like his snappish insult had told her something, stories packed within three bitten off words.

It was only when he was down to his own dregs that he realized that Teyla had long since finished her own meal, quietly waiting while Rodney dragged a fork back and forth through vaguely yellowish mounds of real powdered mashed potatoes, arranged like a cupola protected by craggy cliffs on all sides.

“A walk?” Teyla suggested.

God, it was affecting his ability to _eat_ , now. Disgusted with himself and everything else, Rodney gestured peremptorily to the door of the cafeteria. He didn’t walk so much as stomp, each foot heavy and solid so the reverberations traveled up to his shoulders, skimming over muscles pulled tension-tight, while beside him Teyla glided, easily keeping pace.

She said nothing, which Rodney was grateful for. He liked Teyla, although he wasn’t always so certain she liked him. She was restful, something Rodney was rarely interested in, except when Teyla exerted her own kind of stubbornness and suddenly he realized he might not be interested in it, but he certainly _needed_ it.

“It’s stupid,” he said. It was the first time either of them had spoken since leaving the mess hall, winding their way through hallways until they reached the wrap-around balconies Radek had suggested. They were a favored place for people to walk—or couple, Rodney thought, bitter—the wide pathway full of a bouncing, breezy wind, salty-clean and warmed with their late spring sunshine.

The paths were fortunately empty, right then. Rodney would suspect some sort of plan, except the balconies were usually empty around this time of day, and he wasn’t coherent enough to wonder about it, anyway. All he could think of was—

“It’s _ridiculous_ , and while I am many things, I am not ridiculous. Or stupid. Or—or _distractible_.”

“Perhaps it is not that ridiculous, if it is causing you so much strain?” Sunlight hallowed her, touching the length of her body just so, her face tipped up so her hair fluttered in the wind, body completely relaxed and at ease. For all her obvious beauty, it wasn't the way she looked that caught his attention but the stillness that lived within her. She could rage as fiercely as any of them, and they'd sure as hell learned to fear her anger—but she had this wellspring of contentment, like not even the most violent earthquake could truly rattle her.

He envied her. Since that was a change from obsessively going through every single event he could remember—wet and warm and mm, but _not_ —Rodney clung to the envy. “Teyla, as I’m sure you’ve discovered by now, I am a petty, petty man. I am normally quite comfortable with harping on inconsequential details because invariably they are _not_ inconsequential and it’s merely that I’m smarter than everyone else, enabling me to spot the problem before others were aware of it. If I say it is ridiculous, then it truly is ridiculous.”

“Or instead, maybe you are simply smarter than you are giving yourself credit for?”

Rodney threw her a dirty look. The banister was cool under his forearms, digging into the skin and muscle until it was almost like pain. “It’s distracting me,” he said, trying a different tactic. “If it were a problem that involved the life, health, or safety of Atlantis then I wouldn’t mind it, but it _doesn’t_. It doesn’t affect anything except my ability to eat mashed potatoes!”

Oh, that really wasn’t what he’d meant to say, but Teyla didn’t seem to mind. She continued sunning herself, eyes half-closed in pleasure so that she looked like a statue of a mermaid Rodney had once seen: the clean, long arms and an arched back encouraging the impression that she was moments from taking off the craggy rock she was forever trapped on, to dive back into bronzed waves lapping at her tail.

In that moment, Rodney wanted to build her wings, or a tail, whichever it was she wanted just so she could go on looking that way forever.

“In many subjects, Rodney, you are frighteningly intelligent.” Her eyes were dark and opaque as they locked on his, forcing him to maintain the connection. “But when it comes to certain matters, you are no more knowledgeable than the rest of us. Perhaps less so. Can you tell me _why_ it bothers you?”

No, actually, he couldn’t. First of all, it was private—but second of all, and more importantly, it wasn’t just his alone to reveal. Doing so could potentially damage someone else, causing even _more_ grief and widening the growing chasm that Rodney had been skirting for two long, attention-deficit days.

“Ritalin, that’s it,” he said instead, snapping his fingers in sudden realization. “I need Ritalin, I bet one of those incompetent quacks has a whole stash of it, since it’s the only way they could pretend to believe half of what they say.”

“Rodney,” she said, censorious, yes, but also amused. She enjoyed his insults, just like Sheppard and even Ronon. It was their badge, an obvious way for them to close ranks against the rest of the world. "Why does it bother you?"

He resolutely turned back to the sea. He wasn’t going to say anything. No, really, he wasn’t going to say anything at all because he could keep secrets, despite what everybody but the senior staff believed, and he wasn’t going to—“It _shouldn’t_ bother me,” he half-shouted, “and that’s why it’s bothering me so much! It’s—it’s _petty_. Really petty,” he finished, miserably.

Petty enough to make him believe he really was as bad as conventional wisdom decreed. Normally Rodney brushed those comments off because honesty was much better than misleading, confusing half-truths any day, and anyone incapable of handling that much honest brilliance was irrelevant to begin with.

But this—this was _really_ petty. This was so obviously selfish that it made Rodney’s skin crawl, his stomach knotted tighter than Gordian’s famous knot and he knew the cure would be as painful as any sword cut.

Whether it was him who wielded it or someone else was beside the point.

A sudden burst of warmth on his shoulder made him start, drawn harshly back to reality. Teyla tightened her grip in soft warning, then said, “I have seen you be petty, yes, but not as often as one would think. And never towards those you love.”

That was blatantly untrue, since Rodney could think of at least three or four times he’d been perfectly awful to people, usually when angry, true, but still, and that was _excluding_ Jeannie—but then Teyla's real meaning unfolded in Rodney’s mind. Oh, no. “What—I don’t—what are you—” He stuttered to a stop, caught by the ironic look on her face. He wasn’t sure Teyla had ever looked ironic before.

“I am not wrong, Rodney,” she says, so sure that he almost believed her. “Finish your walk. Think not about your lack of concentration but the problem itself—you are a quick, analytical thinker,” and that was just blatant flattery, although effective, “and you always find the answers.”

She tilted her head, waiting for him to bend to meet her. The practice was still something that felt awkward and weird no matter how many times he’d done it over the last three years, but for all that it was strange, it was nice, too: the intimacy of a hug without the intrusive grab into ones personal space.

Teyla’s forehead was smooth and dry, the bone curving hard underneath soft skin. His was probably a little clammy, but she only squeezed her fingers down, then straightened and left him still half-bent over on the balcony, mind awash with information too scattered to put together in any kind of order, and not at all reassured.

Well. Maybe a _little_ reassured.

Wishing he had his mp3 player, and well aware that it was one more crutch of distraction, Rodney set off down the winding, connecting balconies to see if walking would shake some kind of coherency loose.

* * *

He’d paced by the office three times before he realized that he was being watched. The fact that his pacing had a) not gone unnoticed and b) hadn’t prompted any kind of reaction but silent staring through frosted glass wasn’t exactly reassuring, but Rodney was a man on a mission. Really, he was. Just as soon as he was certain he actually wanted to complete this particular mission.

The radio in his ear crackled. “You may as well come in, McKay,” a rough, gravelly voice said in his ear. “You’re starting to freak out some of my guys.”

Some of his—oops. Rodney flushed as he took in three marines in the room catty-corner to John’s, watching him with wide, speculative eyes. He and John were often the subject of numerous bets, something unavoidable on a base as small as theirs, but that didn’t mean he needed to provide ammunition. Forcing himself to sneer, he barked, “Are you bored? Because there are plenty of things down in my labs that need to be moved. Again.”

It’d been one of his better punishments. They were always moving, shifting equipment and rearranging the tables that slid only when you heaved _hard_. Rodney was a lot stronger than most assumed, but why should he be forced to perform manual labor when there were grunts to do it for him? It became a standing reaction: anyone who pissed off Rodney enough that he went to John about it got stuck in lab duty, moving heavy pieces of furniture or equipment—and at one time, people—whether or not they actually needed to be moved.

All three marines ducked, suddenly very focused on whatever it was they were doing.

Rodney couldn’t concentrate on his own very important, life-saving, Nobel-winning work. Like he cared about what a bunch of marines did?

Threat delivered, Rodney lifted his chin and purposefully kept his feet light as he walked into John’s office, shutting the door and mentally commanding the walls to go opaque. It was one of the more useful things about Alterran glass, something Radek had accidentally discovered. Fortunately anybody could use it, although Elizabeth had to actually get up to toggle the tiny panel by her office door.

John was leaning back in his chair, his inability to sit up straight hard-wired into his DNA. He looked relaxed and a little bemused, but Rodney knew better. He could see the dark shadows that crowded in John’s eyes and the way his chin was tipped down just enough that John was watching him practically through his eyelashes.

That was a bad position. It meant John was either about to do something dangerous and heroic off world, or unleash one of those quiet, pointed comments that left Rodney in shreds once he’d lost the protective shield of his anger.

“McKay,” John drawled. His hips slid over the hard seat of the chair, repositioning himself slightly—to run, probably, or maybe just hurry Rodney out the door. His palms stayed flat on the desk. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Yes, um. That—there was this thing I had to do.”

John’s eyes were already losing the muddy hazel in favor of pure leaf-green, and when they narrowed like that it meant very bad things. “For two days.”

“Yes?”

“You asking me or answering me?”

“Oh, can the authoritative crap,” Rodney suddenly snapped. Comments that could’ve come out of his father’s mouth had absolutely no place in John’s. “There was a thing I had to take care of, and I did, and now I’m here telling you about it.”

His anger never affected John the way it did everyone else. Instead of getting angry right back, John's shoulders lifted maybe half an inch. “Okay. So tell me about it.”

Mind whirling, Rodney started to pace again, needing the swing of his arms and the steady thump of his feet to actually get the words out. Teyla had been right, of course; walking did help. “At first I thought it was me. Well, not just at first, almost the whole time, I thought it was being what everyone always says about me—petty, arrogant, and bad with people. I mean, it’s not necessarily a charge I’ve denied in the past, or will in the future or—or now, and god, this distraction thing could _stop_ any damned time now!”

Sneaking a glance over, Rodney caught John blinking, face utterly blank in surprise, before smoothly reshaping to the vaguely sarcastic and insulting mask that meant he was listening to you, even if he really, really didn’t want to. It was an expression John wore often; one day, Rodney was going to tell him just how intensely annoying it was. “So at first you thought it was you,” John prompted.

“Yes. And I didn’t—like that,” he admitted uncomfortably. “It’s one thing for me to be like that about science, or something _important_ , but I just couldn’t stop thinking about. You made me unable to eat mashed potatoes! The powdered kind!”

“A brig-worthy offense,” John dead panned. “Are you saying whatever this is is my fault?”

“Yes! No! It’s—I don’t know!” Throwing up his hands, Rodney finally stopped pacing. He leaned heavily on John’s half-empty desk—the man had a pathological fear of letting paperwork build up—and tried not let his hands ball into fists. That was a tell John could read too easily. “Not your _fault_ , maybe, but it isn’t me being the kind of jackass I thought I was, which is actually very relieving, but doesn’t make the problem go away, and I’d really _like it_ to go away, because it’s ridiculous. Except in the ways its really not.”

By now John was sitting as straight as he ever did, leaning forward so that he was a bare foot away from Rodney. Like that, they could almost feel each other’s body heat, and the promise of it was tantalizing. Two days was two too many. “Wanna tell me what you’re talking about, McKay? All I know is that we come back from a damned mission that was as boring and uneventful as possible and suddenly, you don’t talk to me. Hell, you can’t even stay in the same room as me. So what am I supposed to think?”

Oh. Well. He’d honestly never thought that this would have any affect on John, who would of course be patiently waiting for Rodney to deal with whatever it was, and smile happily when he came back. Which was... cruel of him. And John never smiled happily unless he was drunk, anyway. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to, um, cut you off, I guess, it was just I had this problem that I really needed to think about and—look, you don’t kiss well!”

Thank god for sound-proofed rooms, since Rodney’s voice was way, way too loud.

Risking a glance, he saw John’s eyebrows were up at his hairline, back flat against the chair, and looking utterly pole-axed. It made him look absurdly young. “What?”

“It’s ridiculous, I know,” Rodney said, up and pacing again. “Believe me, I thought I was going crazy because it’s not like you’re April McDonnell, who I swear was trying to eat my face when we first started kissing, God, she was really awful. It is stupid. Who cares if you don’t kiss well? You aren’t a girl, I’m not a girl, foreplay is nice, but your cock is great, and you’re flexible, and you don’t have a lot of hang ups, and, oh, you’re _incredibly_ hot and seem to be monogamous with me so it shouldn’t be a problem, right? Except it was a problem. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

John’s mouth moved wetly. He hadn’t so much as blinked through Rodney’s tirade. “... what?” he asked again.

“I ruined an experiment because of your crappy kissing, John!” Rodney continued. “Except it wasn’t really about the kissing.”

John shook his head like a dog’s; his eyes probably rattled against their bone sockets from the force of it. “Ookay. Putting aside the whole being insulted thing, I'll go for sanity instead. Don’t make me regret this Rodney, but: what _was_ it really about?”

“It’s always been easy for you.” The need to pace had faded away, leaving Rodney standing stiffly in the very center of John’s office, surrounded by two comfortable looking chairs and at the bottom of John’s big desk. It left him feeling like a petitioner, like if he didn’t plead his case effectively he wouldn’t just lose funding, but maybe the position as well—and that left a hollow, booming echo inside of him that was too overwhelming to even hurt. He couldn’t lose this.

“Sex,” he continued doggedly. “Not relationships, since it’s clear we’re both pretty miserable at those. But sex—you’ve had people throwing themselves at you all your life, haven’t you? Just tilt your hips and cock your eyebrow and there they go, panting after you like you’re some kind of drug they’ve got to have. You’re intelligent, and you can be kind, and you aren’t an asshole most of the time, and really, you could be on _magazines_ you’re so hot, which all means—"

“Means what?” A muscle jumped in John’s jaw.

“It means it’s always been about the orgasm for you. You’ve never—you’ve never cared enough, or hell, maybe no one ever cared enough to teach you, I don’t _know_ , but you may be fantastic at dicking and totally invested in making your partner get off too, which is _great_ , really—but. But you’ve never had to work for it. You’ve never—”

 _had to care_ , Rodney finished mentally. He couldn’t say the words out loud, because he knew John would take them wrong, shades of his failed marriage destroying any chance of Rodney using that statement effectively.

Swallowing, Rodney blinked and realized he’d been addressing John’s desk for the last few moments. Looking up he caught the grey-clad curve of John’s hip and ass as he got to his feet, coming around the desk to put himself between it and Rodney. “So. You’re saying my kissing technique sucks.”

“Um,” he said, still waiting for the slow gleam of the sword as it came down. This wasn’t the kind of thing a self-possessed man like John could take, Rodney knew that. Hell, Rodney didn’t know what _he’d_ do if it was John coming to him with the same problem.

Except that was wrong, because Rodney’d _had_ this problem. No one wanted to be with the biggest brain, not given how effeminate he’d looked when he was so skinny, and not when he was so busy tripping over his feet around the people he _did_ want to impress. So when he finally got the chance to get some, he’d done what he always did: he’d researched, he’d experimented, and he’d worked as diligently at it as he did any science conundrum, until he’d actually developed quite a decent reputation during his graduate career.

Not that he’d gotten much, but it was never his skills in bed that caused his name to be said in quite that tone.

Rodney didn’t resist when John’s hand curled around his hip, drawing him closer. “I think I’m offended,” John said mildly. “And a little later, I think I’m going to make you pay for it.”

That—could be bad. “But?”

“But now... I think you ought to teach me how to kiss right,” he said, a little half-smile brightening the long curve of his face, like maybe he understood what Rodney was trying to say. Understood _enough._ "Unless you think I need an expert?"

“Please, I _am_ an expert. And kissing isn't just about the technique, you know, it's also about finding a rhythm, white man, and oh, saliva is nice, but you really don’t need to swap quite _that_ much of i—mmph!”

True to his word, after the first aggressive push to get their mouths together, John backed off, licking along the seam of Rodney’s mouth almost tentatively as he waited for Rodney to show him, slowly and carefully, that the best kisses didn’t have the be the dirtiest, the most intense coupled with only the barest hint of tongue.

And once he’d done that, Rodney proceeded to try and lick John’s long-removed tonsils, because hey, nasty came with its own rewards.

They were both flushed and panting by the time Rodney uncurled his fingers from John’s shirt-collar, their bodies pressed tightly together. “Still insulted,” John said faintly. “But I think I may forgive you if we do more of that.”

Rodney sighed in relief, tilting his head as he eased small, light kisses over the bottom curve of John’s mouth. There was no immediate slide, no twist as John deftly pushed them to other, more naked activities they way he'd always done before, just the return of those soft kisses, fumbled lightly as John figured out exactly what Rodney was doing and then mimicked it.

“You have a fantastic mouth,” Rodney murmured, a hint of teeth making John start, and then groan.

In between the wet smack of kisses and the increasing harshness of their breathing, John said, “Been told that before. Never—mm—understood it before.”

Rodney accepted that without comment because it didn’t really matter which half of the equation came from which parts of John’s life. John was letting himself be kissed, finally, gradually picking up the speed and tempo that Rodney preferred with the quickness that would always be a turn-on, and the growing heat against Rodney’s hip told Rodney just how much John was enjoying this.

Humming into the kiss, Rodney mentally told the door to lock even as John maneuvered them onto the larger of the two comfortable chairs. Then he curled around Rodney with stomach-fluttering flexibility, hips almost perfectly lined up, their bodies warm and easy together as they kissed, and kissed, and kissed again.


End file.
